Travel Diaries Day 1 & 2: Striving To Do Nothing

Bangaluru. The most dynamic city in the world. If you speak to a traveller who has visited the city, he will tell you of futuristic buildings, beautiful gardens, and vibrant culture of the city. Bangaluru has all that, and more, I agree, but the story of my first day in the city begins with a garrulous, pesky auto driver.

We met this autowallah outside Blossom bookstore (more about that in this Twitter thread) and rather than drop us to the location we wanted, he insisted we go check out a jewelry store so he may earn his commission. Ultimately, since he quoted a fare far less than the metered rate, we agreed to visit the shop. When the time came to do this however, we went in through the front door, walked out of the back door, and waited for some time before making our way back to the auto driver. To our chagrin, he now insisted that he would show us significant sights around the city for a fixed amount of money. Although we surrendered before his pestering then, I am now exacting revenge by giving his phone number to all the dubious websites on the internet that I can think of.

Anyway, we returned to the hotel after the irritating pest scooted us around some tourist sites, and got busy downloading pictures and writing blog posts till late night.
The second day dawned with a brilliant plan, and much hope of perfectly executing it.

However, some of my Goan friends in the city had learned of my presence here from the social media updates, and an old school friend of mine called to meet up. This was the second best, most rewarding meeting of my life because I found out that the aforementioned friend now works with a firm which provides data tracking software to the government of India. He is one of the many ‘digital spies’ who are the eyes and years of governments around the world in the digital realm. We spent half the day talking about old times and new dreams and he departed for duty after lunch, leaving ‘S’ and me to figure out what to do next.

The lawyer then spent considerable time in different bookstores looking for a book titled “The Art of Cross-Examination” by Francis Wellman, but could not find it anywhere, and I ended up impulsively buying “The Pigeon Tunnel” by John Le Carre. After that, we just hung out in a mall that I can’t remember the name of before returning to the hotel for a simple south Indian dinner and retired for the night.

We actually had plans to visit some nice rooftop cafes in Bangaluru but the plan could not materialize because of a little airline company called Air Costa. It was the only company that offered a cheap direct flight from Bangaluru to Jaipur at the very convenient time of 4:30 pm.Unfortunately, the 4:30 flight was suddenly rescheduled to 8:30 am, which is 8 hours early! Receiving this info on our first day in Bangaluru also played a part in ruining that day, but the leathery autowalla still takes the prize.
…………………

A note on Pottery Town

Our first day in the city actually began with a visit to pottery town, Bangaluru. According to the Internet, it is one of the best locations for photography, and Il Sognatore wanted to explore it. We thought it would be a posh area full of handicraft emporiums et al, but it turned out to be a humble settlement of potters. The Dreamer spent many hours studying the activity there before taking just 4-5 pictures. For me it was a royal waste of time. But it was still less irritating than the autowllah.

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